


Cyclical Motion

by UnidentifiedPie



Category: Gintama
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Joui War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-04-29 09:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5122871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnidentifiedPie/pseuds/UnidentifiedPie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gintoki's seen this before. (Shouyou's students in the war.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They leave the villages and enter the battlefield, and the moment Gintoki feels the soft ground beneath his boots deja vu hits.

It occurs to Gintoki that this has happened to him before.

Terror strikes like lightning, and it takes everything he has to steady his breathing as they walk across the battlefield, taking in the blood-soaked dirt and the rotting copses being torn at by crows.

Suddenly he thinks that he knows what's going to happen, how it's going to end. Beside him, Takasugi and Katsura are gagging on the scent of death; it strikes him then, that for all their skill and intelligence, they have never once been on a battlefield, have never once killed a man.

Terror has a death grip on his heart, the same way it did the first time he stepped onto the battlefield, the first time he killed a man and watched blood run down his blade.

(If they fight this war to the bitter end, Gintoki knows how things will go.)

"We'll get sensei back," he says. "We'll get him back and get the hell out of the war."

Katsura and Takasugi, made quiet and sullen by the gory picture of death and blood, nod seriously.

 

-x-

 

They don't find sensei fast enough, that's the thing.

Slowly everything falls back into how it was before; not in the good way, but in the bloody, stinking way that everything used to be, before Shouyou saved him.

He watches men stumble into the camp, wide-eyed and clad in raggedy clothes, with steel-bright determination in their eyes and swords in their hands; reflections of himself, the mirror images of a child stumbling onto a battlefield.

He knows this sad story, this tragic play. He's watched it before.

(Happily ever afters only happen after "Once upon a time"s. When something happens not once, but twice, three times, four times, so many times, over and over until one forgets to count-

-is it still a fairy tale?

Gintoki doesn't think so.)

 

-x-

 

In their first battle, three of his five remaining classmates die.

It's Gintoki's own damn fault. The commander is a stupid ass who refused to change plans though Katsura had pointed out enormous gaps in the formation, but Gintoki was the one who couldn't protect them. He'd been getting used to being in a world of blood and rot and every man for himself, and he'd forgotten that this wasn't the same as when he was a child.

Everything is different, now, and he didn't notice it fast enough. In a world like this, you protect what you have with your two hands and your sword, and you carry your burdens on your back.

Maybe it's because he never thought of his friends as _his_ , but he didn't protect them - he didn't even think of going to them until it was far too late; his mind had been swallowed up by fighting and cutting and taking out just one more enemy. He didn't spare a thought for his friends until they were dead and no amount of trying could have brought them back.

They paid for his mistake with their lives.

(It's not the last time.)

 

-x-

 

They find two of the bodies, bloodied and mangled and once-bright eyes now staring and lifeless and glassy, limbs stone cold.

It hurts like a knife in the chest, twisting slowly, and carrying their bodies - dead weights, now, limp and heavy and just as lifeless as a particularly heavy sack of grain, with strange angles jabbing into Gintoki's ribs and fingers frozen in claws tapping his arms - makes him want to be sick. Takasugi takes the other body and his face is a pale mask of horror and hurt.

They nearly go mad trying to find the third. They comb the dead for hours, wandering through that sea of blood and bodies until the sun begins to set and it becomes hard to see the faces of the dead in the dimming light.

Finally Gintoki stops and breathes out and tells himself that this is just ridiculous, that there's going to be another battle tomorrow and they can't waste their strength looking for their dead comrade in the dark.

He catches Takasugi and Katsura by the shoulders and tells them to give it up; it's not like they can save him, anyway. Takasugi glares at him and Katsura just stares as if he doesn't know what Gintoki is saying, as if he doesn't know who Gintoki is anymore.

Gintoki is suddenly, terribly reminded that they are fourteen, freaking _fourteen_ , far too young to be in a war, far too young for any of this shit.

"Gintoki," Katsura says, and his voice is a choked wail and an admonishment and a plea and a cry all twisted into one distorted, breaking sound. "We can't just-"

"You're a bastard," Takasugi says, with eyes burning with rage and maybe tears, if Takasugi weren't such a stubborn idiot that would never ever let others see him cry or even tear up.

Gintoki grits his teeth and balls his hand into a tight fist and punches him, hard. He feels Takasugi's jaws clack together and the idiot's head snaps back.

" _We can't save him_ ," he says, and it hurts. It freaking _hurts_ , a burn in his chest and white-hot pain in his gut, the words clawing their way from his tight throat. "He's _dead_."

Katsura shuts his eyes and Takasugi's hands fist by his sides, knuckles whitening. Both of them - all of them, really, all three of them, but Gintoki doesn't want to think on that - have hearts that are far too soft, clinging to the people they care about and refusing to let go. Their friend is dead and there is nothing they can do about it, and that hurts both of them, all of them, almost beyond what they can bear.

"But-" Katsura begins, and Gintoki forces the blankness back onto his face.

"The dead don't care 'bout their bodies anymore," he says. "It ain't gonna do any good."

Even as he says it, he knows that the burial of the dead is more than just for the person who died. It's for the people who were left behind, the people who cared. It's a time for them to do something when they couldn't do anything for the person when he was alive even if it _doesn't matter_. Even if it doesn't change a damn thing, they want to and have to try. (It's like hoping beyond hope and trying even if it's worth nothing is programmed into humans, and Gintoki hopes survival instincts can override the programming because he can't watch them die for a worthless cause, he _can't_.) 

What it boils down to, right now, is whether the closure or preparing for tomorrow's battle is more important.

Katsura says: "What if he's alive? What if he's injured and we could save him, if we just searched harder?"

Gintoki grits his teeth. "He would be back by now."

"Not if he can't walk," Takasugi shoots back. Gintoki refuses to flinch.

"One hour," Katsura says.

"Do what you want," Gintoki replies, but there's a cold, heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach and nothing in him can imagine Haru being alive, no matter how hard he tries, no matter how many plausible reasons Katsura and Takasugi may give. He doesn't know if it's instinct or if he's cynical or if he's just plain terrible.

 

-x-

 

They find Haru when the world is nearly pitch black.

He's dead; even in the dark they can see his stomach sliced wide open and the guts and blood that have spilled onto the ground. His eyes are a writhing black mass and it takes a moment for Gintoki to realise that they are swarming with feasting flies. There's a rat eating at Haru's stomach walls and flies eating his spilled organs. Gintoki has seen this before, on a million other men a thousand other times, but this is a boy he grew up with, a boy who he played with and sparred with and encouraged and belittled and travelled with. This is - was - his friend.

He swallows down the bile that burns at his throat and digs his fingers into his palms and doesn't look back when he hears Katsura give a sound halfway between a moan and a retch. He kneels on the bloodstained dirt and he slides his shaking hands under the limp, cold body and he doesn't mention the tears in Takasugi's eyes when he stands.

He holds the rigid, chilly body to his chest and tries to ignore the half-eaten eyes that stare accusingly at the sky. He does not tell Takasugi and Katsura that he told them so.

(He grits his teeth and he swallows thickly and he especially, _especially_ does not cry.)

 

-x-

 

He knows things that a kid his age shouldn't; things that a brat who has never been on a battlefield would never know.

(He's seen this played out a hundred times before.)

When his classmates' eyes go dead after one too many battles, Gintoki knows the way they curl up with what little fabric their stocks can offer. He knows the way they get a desperate, frantic edge in their eyes when there's too little water to wash the blood from their hands and the way they never, ever release their swords, cradling the weapon like it's a safety blanket or gripping it like a lifeline.

Even Takasugi and Katsura go through it - though they hide it alarmingly well, only Gintoki seems immune.

The thing is, he's been there before. Maybe he developed immunity; maybe it was a survival instinct. He doesn't know. What he does know is how to how to use the damp dirt and mud to scrub blood off his hands and how to scavenge bodies for extra food and supplies.

(It's not pleasant or ethical or respectful, probably, but those useless programmings were overridden in Gintoki years ago.)

Katsura and Takasugi taught him to read, to write, to count. They taught him geography and poked fun at his table manners until he got something resembling decent down, taught him how to fit in as something more than a half-wild demon child. Gintoki could tell them that they were the ones who taught him to slowly release the death-grip on his sword, to grow comfortable with merely having it nearby instead of always clutched in his hand.

Somehow it's fitting, that the demon child now teaches them where to rid themselves of the blood on their hands, how to search bodies for food and supplies, and how to dig and layer trenches to collect a little extra water

After he's taught his friends how to clean blood off their hands with dirt and mud, he teaches them how to identify edible plants that somehow manage to survive the battles. Then he shows them how to clean and bandage wounds when the medic is far too busy to worry about a handful of raggedy, cut-up fourteen-year-old boys.

His classmates ask him why he knows this, and he sidesteps their questions neatly, as easily as he sidesteps sword swings on the battlefield. It's common sense, he says sometimes, though it's really not - more than any sort of sense in the world, it was attempts of a desperate child pushed too far that led to these discoveries. Other times he says that it was trial and error; the truth, though only a small fraction of it.

"How do you really know this?" Katsura asks him one day, as Gintoki is pressing marginally clean rags against Katsura's back and ordering him to put pressure on that cut on his arm before he bleeds to bloody death, dammit.

Gintoki wipes blood from the gaping wound on Katsura's back and pours water on it, rinsing out the dirt, then pinches the ends together. "This is gonna hurt," he says, and passes Katsura a stick to bite on. Katsura ignores it and Gintoki shrugs, then pushes a threaded needle through the skin.

Katsura makes a thick gulping sound, like he's trying to swallow down a cry. He might bite his tongue; he should have taken the stick. The moron's probably gonna bite his lip so hard it bleeds to keep from screaming.

Gintoki pulls the bloodied needle through and pushes it in again, and Katsura's shoulders shudder up and down once. "Hold _still_ , damn it. If you move this is gonna hurt more."

Katsura lets out a gasp through gritted teeth. "How do you know that?" He asks, words dragged through his clenched jaw.

Gintoki has to admire his determination.

"Common sense," he says, and this is actually the truth in it's entirety, because how the _hell_ would moving with a needle in your skin _not_ hurt? "Two more stitches. Stay _still_."

Katsura muffles a cry when Gintoki pushes the needle through the blood-slick skin again. Once more, then he's done and cutting the string and Katsura's shoulders are slumping in relief.

"How do you know how to do this, Gintoki?" Katsura asks, with his dogged determination, as Gintoki lifts the rough fabric from Katsura's arm to check the cut there. It's shallow, the blood already clotting, and he sets the needle and thread aside gladly.

"Grew up in a place like this," he answers. He's never been upset to talk about his past, but it's never been something his friends needed or wanted to know about, so he just didn't. He's just not close enough to his classmates to feel comfortable about taking to them about this stuff, anyway. Katsura and Takasugi are probably the only exceptions.

He wipes the blood off Katsura's back with a damp cloth and sets it aside. "Watch your back; don't break the damn stitches."

Katsura just looks at him.

"What do you mean by a place like this?" Katsura asks, and Gintoki shrugs.

"Ya know," he says, gesturing at the smoky sky and the bloodstained dirt. "The battlefield after a battle. Dead Amanto and soldiers everywhere, stray soldiers once in a while, and blood all over the place." He puts his hands behind his head. "Good ol' days, huh?"

Katsura is silent for a long moment, then he shifts over so that his shoulder presses against Gintoki's.

"Oi, what the hell are you doing? Stop moving before the stitches go snap and Gin-san's hard work all goes to waste, idiot."

Katsura just shrugs takes out a box of cards that's only a little bloody.

"Let's play UNO," the idiot says. "Get Takasugi and the others."

 

-x-

 

They are his friends and they are important to him. More important than eating or drinking or even breathing, because the loss of them will be the loss of parts of his soul, and that would be the biggest loss of all.

He fights on the battlefield he same way a drowning man fights for air, the way a starving child fights for food. He fights like his very life hangs in the balance because it does, because it's not just his life he's fighting for but a dozen others' as well, and the burden of their lives is a crushing weight on his back.

He fights tooth and nail, swings of his sword fuelled by desperation and adrenaline and the need to keep them all safe. It occurs to him that only a demon would fight like this, with blood from kills splattering into his eyes even as he spins around to gut another enemy, fighting through the bodies until he is ankle-deep in blood and guts or knee-deep in bodies, whichever comes second.

The demon in him claws its way to the surface, lunging and biting in the gleam of his eyes, in the swing of his sword, sitting restlessly in his veins. Viciousness that belongs to a predator or cornered prey, either, both, he doesn't know which and couldn't care less.

 _You are turning into a demon again_ , Gintoki tells himself, then he thinks of Katsura and Takasugi and each and every one of his comrades and friends who might not breathe another breath if he can't keep them safe.

He thinks of Shouyou-sensei.

 _For you_ , he thinks, and he could be addressing any of them, all of them, none of them. He doesn't know.

_For you, I'll be anything._

Until sensei came along, he never cared that he was a demon, anyway.

 

-x-

 

This is how it goes:

He fights and cuts and fights and cuts and fights and cuts and _tries_ , so hard, so _damn_ hard, to save them.

And his friends die, and die, and die.

 

-x-

 

He shoves away the guilt, because he's been there and done that and he knows what guilt can do to you; survivor's guilt especially.

He can't afford to feel guilty over surviving on the battlefield. Death is always waiting to pull him into its dark embrace.

 

-x-

 

And then they're dead, all of them, some burned and some buried and some just left on the battlefield to _rot_ because there was no time to dispose of the bodies. They're all dead and all that's left on the battlefield of Shouyou's ragtag class are Gintoki, Katsura and Takasugi, and Gintoki can't _breathe_.

"You could leave," he tells Takasugi one day. Rain pours down in torrents, soaking them to the bone as they stand side-by-side, staring at yet another grave.

How many graves have there been? Gintoki can't remember. He remembers - has never quite forgotten - why he never practiced counting a decade ago, on that abandoned battlefield, though he'd learnt the basics of numbers before he fled there. It's because the weight of the tens, hundreds, thousands of mutilated corpses was and is enough and he doesn't need the numbers. Doesn't want the numbers, ever, because things are bad enough.

"I'll save him."

Gintoki can save Shouyou. He will save Shouyou - he _has_ to, because that's what they're here for. That's why Takasugi has lost his bright-eyed innocence and why Gintoki didn't grab Katsura and the rest of his classmates and strangle them for even thinking of stepping onto the thrice-damned battlefield. He can't - won't - let it all go to waste.

Takasugi cuts him a sharp look. "Are you unwell?" He asks, green eyes sharp and shining even in the darkness of the storm. "You haven't slept for four days - you should go rest. Obviously nothing's working right in that stupid head of yours."

Takasugi is right. Gintoki should have known better than to think that his fellow good-for-nothing would ever leave. He shuts his eyes.

"Shut up, Bakasugi, my head's working fine. I'm going to bed."

 

-x-

 

He's watched this tragedy before, he's acted in the play. It's like riding on a train and knowing the ugly, inevitable end.

He copes. He kills. He copes. Rinse and repeat. Just the same; exactly the same as when he was a brat. This, he can live with.

His comrades die around him and _that's_ new, something harder to deal with, something he doesn't know how to fix. He digs them graves when he can and burns their bodies when he can't, and when he can do neither dreams of their rotting corpses haunt his sleep.

Slowly, he stops feeling human, and this too is familiar; that blood-sticky feel on his hands and neck that stretches to his very core, that makes him feel detached and blank and empty.

"Shiroyasha," Katsura says one day, testing the word.

Gintoki barely looks at him.

Katsura must have heard the stories by now. The battle that ended with nothing but the white-clad demon atop a heap of corpses, a monster standing amidst the bodies in a ravine that was more like a mass grave.

Mangled corpses and shredded flesh, wounds and blood making it nearly impossible to see the faces of the dead; crushed, bloodstained armour and limbs twisted at ugly, painful angles making a mountain ridge of hell.

"Apparently."

Amidst it all, crouching with a sword stabbed into the ground, was the Shiroyasha, the only survivor, the creature with steel claws and eyes that matched the bloodstained dirt.

"You could tell them that it's not Shiroyasha, it's Gintoki."

"I'm not you, Zura. Anyway, it never works."

"It's not Zura, it's Katsura."

"See?"

"Failure doesn't mean you should stop trying." Katsura leans against the tree beside Gintoki. Gintoki breathes out.

He wants to say that if failure leads to death, the way failing in the war will, then maybe they should stop, and cut their losses.

Instead he shrugs. "What difference would it make?" He asks, shutting his eyes. "Give them the advantage of having a demon on their side."

There's silence for a long moment. Gintoki feels Katsura's gaze on him, but refuses to open his eyes, the same way he refuses to feel guilty for not being able to protect his comrades.

After the war, after the battles and death, there will be time for guilt. During this period, during this time of blood and death and monsters waiting for the slightest misstep, there is no room for it. Similarly, there is no time for debating his name.

What does it matter? He's been a demon before, and he's a demon now. No. Big. Deal.

"I will call you Gintoki," Katsura says. "It's not Shiroyasha, it's Gintoki."

Gintoki shrugs, refuses to acknowledge the loosening of a certain tightness in his chest.

"Do what you want."

 

-x-

 

There should be something when Gintoki realises that he has stopped caring about the lives he's taken. He's always told himself that he didn't care, that there was no time for guilt on the battlefield. That it was him-or-them and he chose him, no questions asked.

But there was always that painful pull in his gut when he thought about the men he'd killed, the families he'd taken them from. Hell, when he was a tiny brat he'd even cried over it once.

Then one day, after raiding a Bakafu supply ship and watching ten of his comrades slaughtered by soldiers right before his eyes, something switches off. The battle proceeds as per normal, with blood flying and guts spilling to the ground and his sword flashing through the air almost faster then anyone can see, but later- later it's just… click. Blankness that he can't seem to fight through, no matter how much he thinks that he should feel guilty.

Afterwards he thinks back on the men he's killed without feeling that familiar cold-cement feel in his chest.

He stares at the blood on his blade, the splatters of blood on his hands and forearms, and doesn't feel a thing. And he thinks that there should be _something_.

There should be something monumental and earth-shaking, something that shifts in his psyche and changes his world. That's how things always go in a manga. The main character stops feeling bad about the people he's killed, and becomes depressed, realising that he's a bad person, or becomes a literal monster and kills more liberally, without batting an eye.

But Gintoki has always known that he is not a good person. With the things he's done and the lives he's taken, he can't even make it to halfway decent. And the soldiers already know him as a demon.

One day Katsura will tell Gintoki that there is a difference between the soldiers thinking that he's a demon and actually being one, but Gintoki thinks of himself as one, too, to be honest.

He doesn't enjoy killing, but he doesn't resent it, either. And the day he realises that he honestly, truly, really doesn't care that he's just killed, he doesn't break down crying or go on a trigger-happy killing spree.

He wipes the blood off his blade with a dead man's shirt, apologises in his mind to his sensei - sorry for turning into a monster, I know this isn't what you wanted and it wasn't on purpose, except it sort of was - and returns to the camp with the same dull-eyed, blank-faced expression he's always worn.


	2. Chapter 2

Sakamoto Tatsuma arrives on a ship and the first thing he does is throw up on Gintoki and Takasugi. No one can tell if he's skilled or just plain stupid - no one can tell if he'll be a liability or an asset until he makes his first trade negotiation and comes back with more weapons than Gintoki's seen in a year.

"What the hell? There's no way they'd hand over so much!"

"Ahahaha! Kintoki, it's all about how you use your words!"

"My name is Gintoki, dammit! And what the hell did you do? Did you steal it?"

"I told you," Sakamoto says, grinning, "It's all about how you use your words."

"You cheated the suppliers."

"Ahahaha! Of course not! It's just simple wordplay, Kintoki!"

"It's not Kintoki! And that's definitely cheating, dammit!"

He's decent on the battlefield, too, cutting through the Amanto with his sword and holding his own. After Sakamoto's first battle, Gintoki finds him perched on the roof of the temple they're using as a base.

Gintoki climbs onto the roof and settles comfortably beside him, enjoying the cool breeze (for once the air does not smell of blood, even if only because the wind is blowing the stench of the battlefield away from them).

"So," he says at last, when Sakamoto doesn't seem inclined to say much besides "hello Kintoki" and Gintoki's established that Kintoki is not his name. "First battle."

The soldiers had made a big deal about Gintoki's, Takasugi's and Katsura's first battle, asking how it was, laughing, saying that they were amazing on the battlefield. Crowding in, asking if it was too much, if they were going to leave, go running home to their mothers. Katsura's hands were still shaking where they were hidden beneath his bloody sleeves and Takasugi looked half-crazed if you knew how to look, and when the soldiers suggested that they run home Gintoki thought Takasugi might rip their throats out. He'd grabbed Takasugi and Katsura and shoved through the men until they were far, far away from the soldiers, hidden in the forest. Then he'd helped them wash the blood off their hands.

Sakamoto is different. He's been laughing since the battle, smiling big and wide like he might fall apart if he doesn't, and if his laugh has taken on a desperate, shaky edge no one mentions it, just like how Gintoki won't mention that he caught Sakamoto throwing up in the woods right after the battle. He's of age, or at least he's not a child in a sea of men, and the men leave him to get over it himself.

"Ahahaha! Yup!"

"What do you think?"

"What do you mean, Kintoki?"

"It's Gintoki. And you know what I mean."

Sakamoto's quiet for a long while. "It's real ugly," he says at last. "But we've all got to do our part, right?" He punctuates that with a laugh.

"Hm." Gintoki hums. He stares up at the sky. "If it suits you better, stick to swindling our suppliers. We don't need some half-assed idiot getting himself killed out there."

Sakamoto laughs. "How mean, Kintoki!"

"It's not Kintoki, dammit! Stupid empty-headed idiot."

"Ahaha!" Sakamoto grins.

Gintoki shuts his eyes, relishing the quiet - it won't last long

Sure enough, Sakamoto's voice sounds out a while later, quieter than usual. "What about you?"

"Hah?"

"What do you think, Kintoki?"

Gintoki doesn't open his eyes.

He thinks about Katsura, he thinks about Takasugi, he thinks about Shouyou. He thinks about the people who will die if he can't keep them safe, the people who have died because he wasn't able to protect them.

"Didn't you hear Bakasugi?" Gintoki asks. "I don't think."

 

-x-

 

People are getting sick.

The soldiers have always gotten sick, of course. What's a war without tuberculosis, pneumonia or typhoid? They've always gotten sick. Gintoki has watched them die. Sat by their sides, trying to treat them but not knowing how, because all of his medical knowledge involved gashes or burns or broken bones; something he could see, something he could bind. Sickness is something else, something he can't fix, and sitting by their sides helplessly as they die is one of the worst damn things he's ever felt.

This is different. This is worse, because what the hell- their hair turns white and they lose their sight and this- this is like nothing they've ever seen. It spreads faster than a damned wildfire.

"His hair looks like yours," Takasugi had commented when the first man succumbed to the illness. "What did you do, get jealous and dye it?"

Now the illness has been raging for three days. Three days isn't much, but half their camp is sick and dying and that first man is dead.

How do I fix you? Gintoki wants to ask. He keeps his mouth firmly shut whenever the urge arises; spends the days mopping the soldiers' brows with cool cloths and telling them to hang in there, damn it.

I can't see, they say, and their voices tremble with horror and fear - even if they recover, their eyes will never be the same. The tent for the sick is filled with the stench of urine and sweat and death and fear. The entire camp is on edge, nerves like a rubber band stretched to breaking point.

When the first man dies beneath his shaking hands and litany of curses, Gintoki swallows down a sob and stands. He tries to ignore how the tent for the sick is slowly becoming a funeral ground.

They have to do something.

The teasing has stopped; the joking has fallen flat.

"Can you get ahold of medicine?" Gintoki asks Sakamoto.

"I could if there was one." Sakamoto sounds as pained as Gintoki feels.

"What is this?" Gintoki asks. Sakamoto shrugs and shakes his head. For once the idiot doesn't laugh, brown eyes hard and expression stony. The men who died were their friends, their comrades, their brothers in arms.

And they're gone, gone, gone.

 

-x-

 

The soldiers begin to look like caged animals, the ones that are kept in a too-small space with too little to do. They pace the camp with sharp, tense motions - some sit by the sides of the dying, others wander among the dead, and still others stay far away and try to avoid the scent and heavy tension of death.

Katsura marches around the sickbay, giving orders for more medicine, more herbs, more poultices (even when nothing works and the soldiers die anyway and Katsura stares down at the corpses with his face stony in a way that really means he just wants to cry). Takasugi kneels by the sides of those approaching death and talks to them quietly, listening to their last words. Sakamoto alternates between the dead and the living, laughing and drinking and trying to relieve the tension, but it isn't working and they all know it.

And there's Gintoki, who goes around the camp incapable of easing the fear of the living and doesn't know if there's a point trying to treat the sick when they just die, anyway. He takes after Takasugi and speaks to those on their deathbeds, and if it hurts like hell when the dying men talk to him about the families and lovers they left behind, he refuses to let it show.

Sometimes, in his darker, more hopeless moments, he thinks that they should stop wasting resources on the men with the new disease if they're just going to die anyway. He forces it back down with vengeance and throws it into the darkest corners of his mind, but he can feel them lurking there, with their shadows and logic and reasonable coldness.

Sometimes he thinks about the brat he used to be, the way anything was acceptable as long as it kept him alive, and sometimes he misses how easy it was, knowing that his decisions were made purely on logic and calculated odds.

It's harder to come to terms with your decisions when you know that you lose too much and don't gain a thing at all.

(Gintoki is not a good person.)

 

-x-

 

They burn the bodies every night, spend the days bringing the corpses to the edge of the camp. The pyre of dark smoke goes unseen in the darkness of night.

Smoke and ash paint Gintoki's white clothes grey and black - Gintoki never thought that he'd prefer blood to anything in the world, but he looks down at the ashes of his friends on his hands and realises just how wrong he was.

They haven't stepped onto the battlefield for nearly a week, but they've lost a third of their men.

"What are we going to do?" He asks Takasugi.

Takasugi deals with everything in fighting and schemes. Gintoki thinks it's a aftereffect of the guy being (sort of) abused by his parents as a kid.

The Commander of the Kihetai stands and rests a hand on his sword.

"We'll get rid of the Amanto before they hit the camp," he says. If the men are attacked while they're sick, things will go to hell. It'll be less of a war and more of a slaughter.

Gintoki nods and follows.

He's always been more of a fighter than a healer. Death and blood come to his fingers far more easily than poultices and medicines.

 

-x-

 

The Amanto are closer to the camp than they'd predicted. Far closer - near enough that they couldn't possibly have missed the camp. Which brings to mind the question: why didn't they attack?

"How did the scouts miss this?" Gintoki asks, voice a tight growl. His sword whistles through the air and carves a bloody gash through a Yato's chest, erasing the smirk on it's porcelain-pale, blue-eyed face.

Gintoki snarls and carves his way through more of the enemies, and there's blood on his face and blood in his eyes and blood trickling through his fingers and he feels _better._ Finally, after a damn week of watching his comrades die, after a shitty, cursed week of not being able to do a thing, of being helpless as their heartbeats fluttered and stopped, finally he's doing something.

When he laughs, the cold, tinny sound echoes over the battlefield, rising above the roars and screams and clangs of metal. Blood slips into his mouth and down his throat and he mashes his lips together, but they're still pulled up in a devilish grin, and shit, he's a demon, he's a thrice-damned _monster_ -

But he's doing something, and the world is separated neatly into right and wrong and targets and allies and all he needs to do is swing his sword, nice and simple. It is so much better than being _helpless_. He laughs and the way his chest convulses makes it feel more like a sob, his shoulders hitching even as he explodes through the Amanto and drags his sword through their guts.

So simple. So simple compared to watching everyone die, so damn _simple_ compared to standing with his hands by his sides as his comrades die one by one.

He's a damned monster. And maybe it doesn't matter - maybe it will never, ever matter. He roars and brings his sword around in a gleaming arc, and _there_ , the Amanto are dead, all five of them, all ten of them, all twenty of them, and all these lives he's taken aren't enough to make up for the lives he couldn't save.

 

-x-

 

There are strange Amanto on the battlefield, with beads around their necks and red capes fluttering in the breeze, standing in a group on top of a crashed ship.

Takasugi is screaming from wherever he is, and Gintoki can hear fury and desperation making his words raw and his voice rough.

"Get them, Gintoki!" He yells, and his voice carries above the clash of swords and the cries of battle. _"Kill them all!"_

Takasugi is not his commander. But Takasugi is his friend, and Gintoki can hear the need in his voice, the terrible aching desperation that is nearly suffocating him.

So Gintoki goes, calling his comrades to his side, and they're running, swift as the wind to where the creatures stand.

 

-x-

 

His comrades are fast and strong and so damn brave.

He wishes that that could have saved them. As he always tells Katsura, if bravery or steel or determination could save a person, none of the samurai would die.

Too bad they keep dying, then. The creatures are shockingly fast and they have some sort of power or whatever - they can use the dangling cloth of their robes like tentacles, except faster and sleeker and sharper.

The man to his side twists away from one, feints away from another, and is stabbed through the throat by a third. Gintoki doesn't even have time to scream before the man is falling, blood rushing from the wound, and there's no time to mourn because there's more coming for him.

He can taste blood and acrid smoke in his mouth, and he's so sick and tired of everything, of watching people die one after the other, again and again and again. His stomach rolls and there's a lump in his throat and emptiness in his chest, and he weaves through the tentacle-things and stabs the Amanto straight through the neck, just like it killed his friend.

Gintoki pulls away with his lips pulled back in a sneer, twisting and slashing another Amanto in two, and his eyes flash a brighter, more ferocious crimson than even the Amanto's, not that he'd ever know.

He cuts through an Amanto, blade sliding between its ribs to puncture a lung, then yanks his blade out and jumps over its falling body, cutting through yet another of the stupid creatures and spinning forward.

Blood splatters onto his face and soaks his hair, damp stands slapping his face as he slices through another three creatures, and there's wetness on his arms and bloody tissue all over him. Someone moans behind him and it's a knife to his heart, because that sound was human, very human, and that's another friend dying or dead; another friend he didn't save.

"Demon," one of the monsters says, and Gintoki almost _laughs_.

_Kill my friends then call me a demon, will you?_

His sword carves through its soft flesh so easily, too easily, and when he steps on its face to jump over it as it falls, he can't even pretend that he's not doing it out of spite.

_Kill them all_ , Takasugi said.

Gintoki _does_.

 

-x-

 

His comrades lie around him, dead, bodies mixed with those of their enemies, blood spilling onto the ground.

And Gintoki remembers why the battlefield isn't any better than watching his friends die of sickness.

Because it's _easy_ , when there's an enemy in front of him and a sword in his hand, but afterwards, that's when things get hard. He's won the battle, accomplished his goal, except that his friends are still dead, his friends still die, and nothing he does will help them - _it's the same damn thing_. It's the same as standing in that tent with his friends dying and nothing he can do about it, because he can't save them all.

Well, damn.

Shiroyasha, right? He's a demon. He's a screwed up demon that can't do anything - can't cure illnesses and can't cut fast enough to save his friends. So what can he do?

Nothing, that's what. Not one damn thing.

A demon is only good for killing people and watching friends die.

 

-x-

 

He makes it back eventually, stumbling and taking slow, painful steps.

The moment he steps into the camp, Takasugi's in his face, hand fisted in Gintoki's bloody shirt and green eyes wild, searching and frantic and desperate.

"You got them all?" He asks.

"Yeah." Gintoki pushes at him to get him off, and is mildly surprised by how easily Takasugi lets go.

Takasugi staggers back, eyes still fixed on Gintoki.

"All of them?" He asks again, double-checking what he already knows in a manner completely uncharacteristic of him.

"Oi, Bakasugi, how many times do I have to repeat myself? I got them all. What the hell's up with you?"

"It was them," Takasugi replies, and for a split second he looks young and desperately relieved. He looks his age, he looks small and sixteen and it makes something in Gintoki's chest twist, seeing this boy in armour, seeing this child in a war. "It was them all along."

"What?"

"Those Amanto are known as Enmi," Katsura says, striding towards them. "They are mercenaries, known as world destroyers." He looks at Gintoki, brown eyes dark and serious. "They were the ones causing the sickness."

Gintoki stops. He's heard somewhere before that when your heart stops you are considered medically dead, and he's pretty sure he dies in that moment, because his heart definitely isn't beating.

Then it starts again, hard and fast as if to make up for lost time. "How did you find out?" he asks Katsura. His breath trembles on the exhale.

Katsura shrugs, but his eyes are sharp and something in the set of his mouth is awfully smug. "Takasugi got ahold of a very self-satisfied Amanto. From there, it was a matter of extracting information."

What a very interesting way to say that an Amanto blabbed, Takasugi captured it, and the two of them tortured it until it spat out the details.

Huh. Katsura was always good-hearted. Besides Shouyou-sensei, he's the most righteous, upright person Gintoki knows. And now even he has no problems with torture.

War really does mess you up. Gintoki feels something twist (maybe snap, he doesn't know, so many things in him have broken he doesn't care anymore) in his chest and a distant sense of loss, but it's overshadowed by a brilliant, triumphant hope.

"So it's over?" he asks, trying to kill the stupid hope that's blooming in his chest. It's too soon to hope-

"It's over," Katsura says.

"It could have been lying," Gintoki points out, because it seems too good to be true. Katsura looks calmly at him.

"Shouyou sensei always taught us to cross-reference our sources," he says.

Ah. So Katsura and Takasugi tortured more than one Amanto. Haha.

It's over it's over it's over it's over it's over - they're saved. He doesn't have to watch his friends' hair turn bloody white or watch their eyes cloud over again. It's alright, it's over-

He made it in time. He cut the Enmi down in time to save some.

Gintoki tilts his head back and laughs, a ragged sound that comes in tattered, shuddering gasps. He pretends that he's just shaking because he's tired.

They're saved. They're saved. They're saved.

Maybe miracles do happen, after all.

Suddenly all of them are laughing, high and wild and happy and fiercely _relieved_. They're drunk off joy and relief and the sheer thrill of being alive. Of having friends and comrades who aren't going to die, of being together for just another day.

The next night, for the first time in weeks, they don't burn a single body.

And for once - for _once_ in the entire damn war - it's enough.

 

-x-

 

The day after that they burn six bodies, and Gintoki knows that it will never be enough.

 

-x-

 

He catches Sakamoto throwing up around the corner a few battles later.

It shouldn't be a big deal. Sakamoto throws up whenever they get on a moving vehicle, or an airship, or even if they just spin him around a few times.

But Sakamoto's shoulders are shuddering in a way they never do, and they haven't done anything to mess with the idiot's stomach - there's been a huge battle, and they haven't had the time or energy to hassle the idiot.

Sakamoto's hand, pressed against the wall for balance, is stained with dull, drying blood.

It's a shame, Gintoki thinks. It's a damn shame. Sakamoto is strong, strong enough to be one of their best men, but he's too damn kind, so fiercely desperately kind that he tries to save their enemies on the battlefield; he'd rather incapacitate than kill, and it takes a lot of strength to do that in wartime.

The irony, Gintoki supposes, is in the fact that Sakamoto is so good at fighting when killing makes him sick.

He sighs as he leans against the wall, patting Sakamoto's back a few times.

Sakamoto laughs between retches. "Ahahaha! I'm sorry, Kintoki! I get land sick sometimes, too!"

Bullshit, Gintoki thinks. But maybe that's true, in a roundabout way. Maybe they're all land sick sometimes.

Because damn, Gintoki's sick of looking at the corpses and bodies. He's sick of watching people die. He's sick of being the one to survive when everyone else in the camp deserves to live more than he does. He's sick of looking at the bloodstained dirt.

He sighs and rubs his shoulder - it always aches, now, from days of wielding a sword and because some old injury there likes to make itself known frequently.

"Idiot," Gintoki mutters. Sakamoto tenses subtly, as if bracing for a blow - Gintoki doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry. "If it's so hard, just leave."

"Ahahaha! That's harsh, Kintoki!"

Gintoki hums, looking up at the sky (it's choked with black smoke).

"Is it?" He wonders out loud. "It's pretty sickening, isn't it, watching them all die? Having that blood on your hands?"

Sakamoto gags and retches, dry heaving more than anything. Still, he's listening, Gintoki can tell. "Aren't you tired?" Gintoki asks. "Of watching this?"

(Gintoki's tired. He's so damn tired, and so damn sick of it all.)

 

-x-

 

Time passes, and eventually Katsura's UNO cards become too bloody to play with.

Katsura argues that they're not, that they're waterproof and anyway you can still make out the numbers and even the colours of the cards if you squint - if there's enough light, Gintoki allows, enough light definitely being more than the flickering glow of the campfire that's about the most the soldiers can offer half the time - but then the deck is sliced in half by an Amanto sword that came dangerously close to gutting the idiot and it becomes a moot point, anyway.

Because they still need a way to ease the tension of the soldiers - because _something_ has to be done - they eventually invent a new game that involves sticks and stones and, as a penalty, swords and the chicken dance. Nobody quite understands how it came about or how it's actually played; the only reason why the soldiers or anyone at all seems to participate is because of how utterly ridiculous it is. At any given point of time all of the four inventors of the game - Katsura and Gintoki and Takasugi and Sakamoto - are at odds about the rules, which seem to change in favour of each person whenever the need requires, and there are only two things that are absolute about the game. They are:

_One_ , that it inevitably ends with two unfortunates doing a strange hybrid of the chicken dance and a sword fight; and _two_ , that nobody can make heads or tails of the rules or how they even get to the end point anyway. In all of the games there are, more often than not, just as many sets of rules as there are participants, sometimes more.

That said, it accomplishes its purpose: it relieves the tension of the soldiers and makes the camp more lighthearted, and if it's absolutely fun and makes everyone laugh a laugh previously unique to Sakamoto - obnoxiously loud but so damn happy that you have to pardon the annoyance, until the annoyance gets to the point where that's really impossible, no matter how freaking happy the idiot sounds - well. That's just a bonus.

Those times - sitting around the fireplace with tired muscles relaxing and idiots laughing and finding his mouth curving into a grin - those are good times. Shining moments in a bloody world, spent in bloody clothes with sweat drying on dirt-crusted skin - not perfect, dirty and flawed and fit together with broken pieces, but good nonetheless.

They're happy, and Gintoki knows that in this sort of place, happiness is almost more than you can ask. It's a miracle and a privilege and a luxury and as he laughs he leans against Katsura and pokes fun at Takasugi and tells Sakamoto to shut up if he doesn't want to call the entire Amanto battalion onto them, does he not know the meaning of stealth?

He grips the moment tight and holds it close and draws more warmth from the happiness than from the campfire. And for a precious, imperfect-but-still-good moment, everything is alright.

 

-x-

 

Those aren't perfect days, but they're good, and by Gintoki's (admittedly low) standards, they're close enough that they count. There are other days, too, not exactly perfect but damn near close, days where they find a comrade they thought for sure was dead, days when said comrade can be fixed up by just a few bandages and a good night's sleep.

There are days that are much, much worse; days spent on the battlefield after days and nights of fighting, with blood and sweat in his stinging eyes and a steady, screaming burn in his muscles and the dead all around him. Days of stumbling through the dead to look for survivors and not finding any; not finding anything but blood and staring eyes and twisted limbs and shitshitshit he's going to be so sick because he knew them, he knew them, he bantered with them and laughed with them and laughed at them, and now they're dead and he can't do this. Days where the bloodlust and fury thrums through his veins long after the battle is over, and he strides around the camp with blood drying on his clothes and guts still on his arms and everyone shrinking away from him like prey avoids a predator; Katsura and Takasugi and Sakamoto are all on dangerous missions and he can't help them.

Sanity and humanity are surprisingly fragile things, easy in peacetime and easy to shatter in war. And Gintoki knows that he's walking a thin, fraying line.

 

-x-

 

Sakamoto gets injured. Sakamoto is _crippled_ , trying to protect an enemy soldier of all things. The tendon in his wrist practically severed, and he's brought back on a stretcher, pale and shaking and smiling like that frail desperate stretched-too-thin smile is all that's holding him together.

Of _course_ Gintoki knew this was going to happen. How could it not? This is war, this is a place of death and fire and blood where you can barely save your comrades, let alone your enemies. And Sakamoto, who burdens himself with the injured Bakafu soldiers, who acts as if he'd like to save the whole world, was always going to end up like this. He's just lucky he's not dead.

_Of course_ Gintoki knew that. But Sakamoto was so strong, so constant, so _persistent_ in his kindness, that Gintoki never really believed it.

Sakamoto covers his eyes with his uninjured hand, a shining tear running down his grimy cheeks, and something else in Gintoki breaks, snapping straight in two and dropping from his chest like a bird with severed wings, shattering in his gut and sending fragments stabbing through his stomach.

Takasugi smiles like he's going to cry and Katsura goes grim and stony and still. Gintoki grabs Takasugi and they go for revenge.

They like stupid wars, Gintoki and Takasugi. The need for revenge claws in their blood, their bellies, their throats, desperate for release. And they let the beasts out, laughing, desperate, breaking, two boys on a battlefield, two children playing war. They let the beasts out and they go for revenge because revenge is a stupid battle, because it doesn't fix anything - doesn't make Sakamoto better or Katsura stop looking so grim or stop each other from breaking-

-but it makes them feel better to let the fury out. So they meet the bastard who did it, they draw their swords and release their beasts. And Gintoki can't pretend that it's not out of spite.

He wants to ruin the world for hurting his friends. And maybe he'll be sorry.

But maybe he won't.

 

-x-

 

Sakamoto won't get better. Gintoki can tell from the stony look in Katsura's eyes, from the way Takasugi glares at the ground like he wants it to burn to ashes, from the scars on his own body - the marks of that decade-old battlefield that still ache when it's cold.

Sakamoto won't get better. Gintoki turns away and pretends that it doesn't hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Somebody_ had to take advantage of the fact that, in Be Forever Yorozuya, the Enmi were mentioned to have decimated like half of the Joui forces. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please drop me reviews and lemme know what you think; I would hate to have this up if it sucks, and I love knowing what everyone thinks! Also reviews would make me real happy and that'd be cool. :)
> 
> God bless!

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed reading. Let me know what you think? I mean, if it's awful I gotta know so I can at least fix it or take it down to spare posterity.  
> Thanks for reading and God bless!


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